another reason to finish

Mar 7, 2009 8:48 AM
another reason to finish
by doctorzamalek

This week I’ve been trying to encourage someone who is working on a Ph.D. It’s almost finished, but a drop-dead date is approaching in May, and she’s starting to panic. I haven’t seen the existing pages of the dissertation, but did see the M.A. thesis, which looks wonderful. (It’s not in philosophy, but in a subject that I can follow.) She’s also a highly benevolent, positive-energy person, and is simply being too self-critical and needs encouragement from the outside. We should never tire of encouraging such people; the world becomes a better place when they succeed, and a colder and sadder one when they fail.

That’s one type of unfinished doctoral student. There’s another, rarer, less pleasant type that one should seek to avoid becoming. This is the type that indulges in the arrogance of vaguely or consciously thinking: “I’m just too conscientious compared to all these other sloppy writers.” This becomes their alibi for not finishing.

At some point I still want to do a post on alibis, which I think lie somewhere near the core of ethics. As I said in an earlier advice post, if there is something that you really, badly want to get done, it’s important to stay away from the Alibi People. They are already assembling excuses in advance for why they will fail, and they won’t want you to move the ball in your own life, because it will undermine their excuses. The only option is to stay away from them, and spend your time with people who are actually trying to get things done. If you’re not there yet yourself, that’s fine, as long as you want to get there. They will rub off on you. I’ve already said that back in my early twenties “writer’s block” days, it was highly valuable for me to spend a lot of time around Alphonso Lingis, a writing machine who produces gorgeous prose literally on a daily basis. If you’re in a low-energy state, you need to find high-energy peers, not low-energy peers with which to commiserate.

Of all the people who have been most rude toward my blog, many of them turn out to be graduate students with unfinished dissertations. Thankfully, they are a minority even in that subgroup. A large number of people from this demographic category have thanked me for the past advice on how to finish up and move on; these are the ones who actually want to finish, and it was toward them that the advice was directed.

But another group of the unfinished seems motivated by the principle that “work that is never finished can never be judged.” There is a fear of actually putting together a finished product, and hence they turn toward judging others harshly instead. Another relevant point comes from Borges: “as a general rule, authors judge others by what they have written, but judge themselves by what they plan to write.” And so it goes with the overly aggressive unfinished dissertation writer. As long as the ultimate masterpiece remains in their heads, then of course the actual accomplishments of others will pale in comparison.

What bothers these people most is when others are prolific. They try to tell themselves that they are simply too rigorous to stoop to that level of sloppiness. After all, they observe such high standards compared to the unruly mob, and this is why they are still working on those dissertations years and years later.

In person you can tell who these people are by the faintly sneering look they have on their faces while addressing you. In the blogosphere I can tell who they are because they always seem especially bothered by my posts about how to increase your productivity. They dismiss supposed academic trickery and pat themselves on the back for being above any practical techniques not just for writing, but even for learning about the scope and limits of their own theory by testing it on new subject matter constantly. There is only one way to develop intellectually, and that is to test your intuitions and hunches constantly by trying to develop them in close contact with the differing work of others. The alternative is to sit in the bleachers and jeer whatever is actually being done.

As a demographic group I tend to love unfinished dissertation writers, because they care deeply about some topic, and are often self-destructive in needless ways that are extremely easy to fix with a few kind words from outside. Moreover, it’s an extremely important group of people to help, because some people who throw in the towel on this involuntarily end up throwing in the towel on many other things. There are few groups of people on earth who can be so decisively helped by a small bit of kindness at just the right moment.

However, around 10% of this demographic group is made up of the most swaggering, arrogant cusses and know-it-alls I’ve ever encountered. If you succeed in becoming unusually productive with your time, this is the group that will try to cut you off at the bridge with their stones and broken bottles, alarmed by your forward march and trying hard to convince themselves that it’s all a cheap p.r. stunt that they are far too noble to emulate.